Microsymph is a large-scale five movement symphony that has been squeezed into only ten minutes. The result is a frantically paced, restless, quick-changing kaleidoscope of five highly compressed movements which are built from a whirl of diverse materials into an eclectic amalgam of ceaselessly changing sounds, colors, and ideas.  The first movement, quickchange, is modeled on a sonata-form movement, but in a highly compressed form, where one idea races to the next.  The second movement, minute waltz, is as much about the minute as it is about the waltz.  In the movement there are two layers: one a musical representation of the inner workings of a clock, the other a waltz.  Though the third movement, adagio, is only four minutes long, it seems truly expansive within the context of the other movements. It is scored for strings, brass, and ringing pitched percussion.  The fourth movement, nanoscherzo, is composed of layering similar to the minute waltz and the last movement, kaleidoscope,  parodies the idea of a cyclic symphony where themes from previous movements return, here increasing the feeling of compressed time. Microsymph was written for and commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and premiered at Carnegie Hall in December 1997.

Nightmaze is a multimedia work for live instrumental ensemble, spoken voice, digitally processed sound, and video  Projection.  Commissioned by the Network for New Music with funding from the Barlow Foundation, Nightmaze was created by composer Sebastian Currier (music) in collaboration with video designer Sage Marie Carter (video) and writer Thomas Bolt (text, roadsigns).  As Nightmaze begins, a college student, after studying without sleep for three days straight, has just finished his final exams in Physics, Cosmology, Psychology, Economics, and “the Male Sublime.” He falls into a deep sleep and—his mind saturated with half-understood ideas—dreams he is rushing along a dark, enormous highway on which he is the only driver.

Nightmaze follows his journey through a dream world of sexual desire, fear, and longing ordered only by the strange roadsigns that loom up along the way, forcing him to choose his course from among their stark, binary options.  Nightmaze uses tightly interlocking music, narration, and animation to evoke the dark and glittering sweep of a nightmare Interstate (labeled UNCONSCIOUS 1). The music’s incessant motion underscores the road’s changing rhythm as the dreaming protagonist is confronted again and again with foreshortened warnings, forced instructions, and paired alternatives out of Freud, physics, cosmology, and the philosophy of Edmund Burke.

While the music is rich and dynamic, the video is spare, showing only the empty highway and its strange signs, which emerge from the distance and rush past overhead as the baffled dreamer speeds on into the night.


NIGHT MASS
short description

When I first met with  Jonathan Sheffer to discuss writing a piece for Eos one of the very first things he asked was “Do you want to write a mass?” It was, in truth, one of the last things I would have ever thought of writing, but when he suggested it I found it immediately appealing.

I’ve always loved the musical form of the mass, particularly when in the hands of Old Masters like Josquin, Byrd or Lassus.  But in setting a mass myself,  I felt the need to bring something of the world I live in now into contact with this beautiful old text.  And for me, that something  was the way my view of the world was formed by science.   When I see the night sky littered with stars I know that they are at unfathomable distances from earth, that some of these faint pinpricks of light are themselves entire galaxies made of billions of stars, that all these lights are rushing away from each other at incredible speeds, and that despite their remoteness I am intimately connected to them.  Almost all the chemicals that make up my body where forged in an ancient generation of stars that exploded their mass out into the universe. .  We are all made of stardust.  It’s dizzyingly strange, but by all accounts true.  It’s this sense of awe about the world we live in that I felt was somehow in tune with the religious awe that inspired the text of the mass, written so long ago.   But there is a darker side too.  It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of this description of physical world and in the end science admits to huge uncertainties.  Belief forms the core of the Latin mass.    At the heart of “Night Mass” is a mixture of wonder and doubt.  

The piece follows the ordinary sequence of movements in a mass except that the Credo  is replaced by a new text written by Thomas Bolt.  The movement is entitled “Incertum,” which means “uncertainty.” 

The five short movements of Night Time - Dusk, Sleepless, Vespers, Nightwind, and Starlight - share a sense of quietude, introversion, intimacy, and subdued restlessness.   The instrumental ensemble itself, violin and harp,  suggested to me right from the start a series of nocturnal moments, where a sense of isolation, distance and quiet thoughtfulness would prevail throughout otherwise thematically contrasting movements.  From the distant murmuring sounds in Dusk to the disquiet of the pizzicato ostinato and muted chords in Sleepless, from the contemplative lyricism of  Vespers to the rushing passage work in Nightwind,  and in the hypnotic figurations of Starlight there is an affinity with a phrase of a Wallace Stevens poem, that I set in another work, Vocalissimus:  "in the distances of sleep."   The piece was written for  Marie-Pierre Langlamet, harpist of the Berlin Philharmonic, and violinist Jean-Claude Velin.  It was premiered at the Philharmonie in Berlin in 2000.


QUIET TIME
short description

Quiet Time was written during the summer of 2004 while I was in residence at the Ma Dowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.  It was written for the Cassatt Quartet, a wonderful string quartet that I've had a long association with.  In fact, they had asked me for a new piece to complete a CD they were making of another string quartet of mine, Quartetset, which they had premiered nearly a decade before.  Knowing this, I decided to make my new piece, Quiet Time,  connect to the old one.

The connection, call it commentary, reflection, revisitation, is not particularly dogmatic.  Nonetheless, on as basic level they do share some details  in common.   Both have seven movements, and though the parallels are at times quite loose, the movements of the newer quartet reflect, albeit rather obliquely, those of the older ones.  In Quartetset there is a basic division of material into two worlds - probably most obviously presented in the last movement, where the simple, diatonic material in the  second violin is constantly juxtaposed with discordant material in the other instruments .  Quiet Time explores this further, but in a distinctly different manner. 

In this piece, the division is into source and processed material, a sort of purely instrumental fantasy on computer  based digital signal processing.  We hear "primary" material undergo such processes as filtering, reverberation, ring modulation, delay, and time compression.  Thus the basic dialectic in Quartetset - tonal reference versus non-tonal, dissonance versus consonance - here becomes natural versus artificial sound.  In the first movement, Antiphon, for example, the first phrase, which presents the quartet in a warm full-bodied mode of articulation, is answered by a"processed" repetition of the phrase, now as if passed through a ring modulator and low-pass filter.  In the third movement, Reverberation, the second violin plays lyrical fragments which are enveloped in a rich resonance - the rest of the quartet functioning as a resonating chamber, elongating, ephemeralizing each note.   Clearly, the two quartets also have their  differences. Quartetset is a rather sprawling work, over 45 minutes, and Quiet Time, by comparison, is much compressed.   The sound world of Quiet Time is very different from it's model, as a whole, both more varied and more ephemeral.  The name Quiet Time of course, to some extent, reflects this overall sound world, but it is also intended to embody the environment where it was written.  The piece is dedicated to the MacDowell Colony, which provides solitude, quiet time, freedom from every day life, beautiful landscapes,  like-minded souls - almost everything I could think of wanting.

REMIX
short description

Remix is scored for mixed chamber ensemble and electronics. Its form is that of an extended antiphon. Essentially there are two, almost entirely separate, instrumental ensembles that alternate. The first is a trio of horn, violin and piano – the ensemble of Brahms’ exquisite trio (and Ligeti’s homage to Brahms) – and the second is all the remaining instruments – flute, clarinet, percussion, harp, viola, cello, double bass, and electronics. The first group presents material and the second follows with a ghostly restatement. Although the horn trio never quotes Brahms, the voice - leading and instrumental writing recalls the past. The following transformations heard in the second ensemble are blurry, elongated in time, and rich in subtle colorations. As the piece unfolds, these two worlds of sound follow one another on a parallel course, relentlessly echoing back and forth.


SCARLATTI CADENCES AND BRAINSTORM
short description (scarlatti)   short description (brainstorm)

Although brought together as a set of complimentary short piano pieces, Scarlatti Cadences and Brainstorm each have an independent genesis. Scarlatti Cadences was written for pianist Emma Tahmizian. The outer sections take "Scarlatti-like" cadential formulas and expand upon them, creating delicate, sonorous and ephemeral textures, while the middle section emulates the percussive drive of many a Scarlatti sonata. Brainstorm, written for pianist John Kamitsuka, was written while I was in residence at the American Academy in Rome and dedicated to the then US ambassador to Italy, Ambassador Bartholomew. The piece constantly interweaves tonally ambiguous chromaticism with simple diatonic progressions in a satirical and sometimes raucous manner. It is in this combining of diverse, even opposing harmonic materials that the two piece, Scarlatti Cadences and Brainstorm, come together and share a common thread. As a set, the work was premiered at the 2005 Van Cliburn Competition.


STATIC
short description

It could be some sort of Rorschach’s test: what do you think of when you read the word "static?" Is it of something unchanging and in a state of equilibrium? Or is it of the erratic white noise that interferes with a radio signal? Both these divergent meanings relate to certain aspects of my piece, which, with it's six movements of varying tempo and character, still retains vestiges of a sonata cycle (Remote, Ethereal, Bipolar, Resonant, Charged, Floating). The slow, distant, wave-like chords that open the piece suggest an interior landscape that is inert and unchanging. This gesture becomes a motive throughout the piece, heard or felt in almost every movement. As early as the second movement traces of the other "static" emerge. This musical interference takes several forms, but one of the most characteristic is where string trills are played in harmonics, paired with changes in bow pressure and placement, which causes various harmonics to stand out in a constantly changing and random fashion. In the fourth movement (Resonant) the irregular,unpatterned ornamental gestures in the piano create a static of sorts against the long lines in the strings. In the third movement (Bipolar) the juxtaposition is most pronounced. The movement consists of a long held static chord which is abruptly interrupted by a rough, chaotic and intense passage (radio static with a vengeance!) which almost as abruptly ends, leaving the static chord once again in the wake of its turbulence. The fifth movement (Charged) defines the arc of the piece as a whole, dividing it into before and after.
Although the material is drawn from earlier movements, this movement stands out from the others both because of its sustained intensity (the other movements in general tend towards quietude) and because of its substitution of flute and clarinet with piccolo and bass clarinet. In the last movement (Floating) material from other movements return- not so much with a feeling of formal closure or recapitulation, but as disembodied fragments of memory that float by, emerging out of an ethereal static, which gains ever increasing prominence as the movement progresses. Static was written for Music from Copland House, which was made possible by a commission from Meet the Composer. It was premiered at Miller Theater in New York in February, 2005.


VARIATIONS ON "TIME AND TIME AGAIN"
short description

In his Variations on “Time and Time Again,” Currier upends the typical theme-and-variations genre, in which a melody or other generative material will be introduced at or near the outset, and then deconstructed, expanded upon, or otherwise developed. In Currier’s compact work, melodic and harmonic cells or fragments appear during the course of the four interconnected variations. For most of the piece, the theme seems almost like a mirage, just imagined or hinted at – re- interpreted before the fact, as it were. The theme finally appears near the end of the work, and turns out to be a languid, richly-harmonized bluesy ballad Currier has called “Time and Time Again” (and worthy of being expanded into its own independent composition!).

As in other Currier works, the title evokes multiple meanings. The literal passing of time is suggested at the work’s very beginning, with delicate specks of sound and the clicking of keys on the flute proceeding only a little slower than a clock’s ticking seconds. This fragmentary chronological landmark re-appears throughout the work as a buffer between each variation, reminding us of time’s inexorable presence. The first variation brusquely interrupts, with a vigorous, declamatory gesture contrasting starkly with the soft tread of bluesy chords that already hint at the impending theme’s jazzy harmonies. Variation 2 is brilliant little dance in which the main theme’s melodic contours begin to assume greater prominence. Variation 3 seems almost improvisatory – an expansive, highly-embellished meditation set atop a sumptuous harmonic background – and grows an impetuous fugal variation that recapitulates some of previously-heard material. Stark silence follows a massive climax, heralding the long-awaited appearance of the brief, sultry theme, which disappears quickly – almost an illusion. Passing time returns, but now dissolves into an ascending stream of trills that evaporate into silence. (written by Michael Boriskin)


VERGE
short description

Verge was written for and dedicated to the Verdehr Trio. The idea for the work is taken from the title of one of the pieces in Schumann’s Kinderscenen – Almost too serious. Implicit in the title is an aesthetic boundary which, although it may be approached, should not be crossed. If the piece were too serious it would cause it to be out of balance with the simple, childlike world of Kinderscenen as a whole. On the other hand, as long as it does not cross this threshold, it may come as close as possible. It is this idea of being on the verge of some extremity or another that becomes the basis of my piece. Each of the nine movements stands on the edge of excess and I use the phrase borrowed from Schumann to describe them: almost too fast, almost too slow, almost too mechanical, almost too dark, almost too light, almost too fractured, almost too much, almost too little, almost too calm. The nine movements can be divided into cycles of three, each beginning with a pair of movements that oppose one another: fast – slow, dark – light, etc. Almost too much forms the dramatic center of the whole. Almost too fractured presents brief quotations from the other movements.


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